A simple solution to Archimedes' cattle problem

MaRDI QIDQ2713284zbMATH OpenFDO

Authors Antti Nygrén

Publication date 7 May 2001

Published in Acta Universitatis Ouluensis. Series A. Scientiae Rerum Naturalium (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL http://herkules.oulu.fi/isbn9514259327/

zbMATH Keywords

Archimedes' cattle problemquadratic Diophantine equations

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Quadratic and bilinear Diophantine equations (11D09)

Review text

A simple solution to the classical Archimedes' cattle problem is given. Unlike the previous ones, this is based mainly on elementary mathematics which, at least in principle, would have been available to the mathematician of the classical era. The solution applies linear transformation and infinite descent in solving quadratic Diophantine equations in a manner that does not explicitly take advantage of continued fractions. The idea is to create a sequence of transformed equations until an equation is obtained that can be solved easily. The method of solving the Diophantine equations is especially suitable for a computer, and the result can be used easily to produce several numerical solutions to the cattle problem.

Recommendations

• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 18743
• Solving the Pell equation
• Archimedes' Cattle Problem
• On the cattle problem of Archimedes
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 6428998

Cited in

(5)

• On the cattle problem of Archimedes
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 18743 (Why is no real title available?)
• Archimedes' Cattle Problem
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1143997 (Why is no real title available?)
• The Noah's Ark Problem

This page was built for publication: A simple solution to Archimedes' cattle problem

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q2713284)